Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm really happy to have as my guest, Juno Diaz, whose new book, The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wow has been published by Riverhead Books.

He's the author as well, of course, of Drown, a collection of short fiction.

And I became very eager to talk to him because as I was reading the brief wondrous life of Oscar Wow,

I felt like I was being woken, besieged and woken, because its hero, Oscar Wow, is someone very much like me.

I am a lover of reading. Oscar Wow is a lover of that sort, a nerd, who loves the world of role-playing games, science fiction, and fantasy novels,

and he's living in a cocoon. He's become very heavy. People tell him he can't be Dominican

because, after all, here he is. He's graduated from college, and he's still a virgin.

And it's a book about the ways in which the world will take you and shake you if you try to escape it.

And as I was reading, I became aware that there are so many cultures,

not just the language of the Dominican

diaspora, the Spanglish that gets spoken on the street, but so many things are operating

within individual groups and idelects and things that are their own cultures within America.

And I thought, wow, I've got to start to appreciate the fact that it's not just the geopolitical

languages like Spanish or Arabic, but the languages of the things we come to care about and love that animate our lives

and protect us within our own subcultures.

...